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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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Among
the shocks Donald Trump has wrought to American politics, one of the strongest
has been his assault on bedrock tenets of American foreign policy. The
Republican nominee for president has urged better relations with Russian
president Vladimir Putin, called into question the value of NATO, and expressed
disdain for European integration. At first, the “unfair” media mostly ignored
Trump’s novel geopolitical worldview, but after Trump conveyed his support for
Russian efforts to spy on Hillary Clinton, the “unfair” media started calling
attention to the consummate dealmaker’s business relations with Russia and the
pro-Russian sympathies of his key advisors.

This whole weird soap opera might have been tremendously
funny, except for the fact that Trump could end up as president of the United
States. That frightening prospect compelled former CIA director Michael Morell,
in an August 5 op-ed for The New York Times, to label Trump an unwitting agent
of the Russian Federation. Those who remember the Cold War or who follow
European politics are familiar with Russian attempts to meddle in the
democratic processes of Western countries. Usually, however, that meddling
remains on the margins. That it assumed center stage in an American
presidential election is simply stunning, and an indication of how disastrous a
Trump presidency could be.

To understand how bad Trump’s foreign policy “vision” is, one
must see the way that US interests have come into conflict with the interests
of Putin’s Russia. Since World War II American foreign policy has aimed at the
economic and democratic integration of Europe. The premise underlying this
policy is that integration is the necessary condition of a permanent European
peace. Economically dependent nations have strong disincentives against
fighting each other, and democratic states hardly ever, indeed arguably never,
wage war among themselves. The best way to avoid war in Europe, therefore, on a
continent plagued by war historically, is through economic integration and the
spread of democracy.

Putin’s view of the matter, however, is quite different. From
his perspective, the economic and democratic integration of Europe represents a
threat to Russia’s historic hegemonic interests. Compared to any single
European state, Russia is a great power, but compared to an integrated and
well-functioning European Union, Russia is a weaker party forced to play by
European rules. Thus, insofar as Putin perceives Russian interests
hegemonically, his foreign policy will aim both to thwart and roll back
European integration. And to be sure, Putin has been working to undermine the
European Union for a number of years. He does this partly through military
intimidation (annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine), partly through economic
pressure (attempting to control the flow and price of gas from Russia to
Europe), and partly through a distinct kind of information warfare.

Russian information warfare is not a naïve propaganda
strategy that aims to brainwash. Rather it seeks to generate uncertainty about
Russia’s intentions and the state of international affairs so that Western
decision makers will choose the path of least resistance, which just so happens
to coincide with Russian objectives. According to Maria Snegovaya at Columbia
University, the Russians refer to this strategy as “reflexive control.”
Reflexive control seeks to cause “a stronger adversary voluntarily to choose
the actions most advantageous to Russian objectives by shaping the adversary’s
perceptions of the situation decisively” (Snegovaya 2015, 7). As an example
Snegovaya cites Ukraine, where Putin has been employing reflexive control to
persuade the United States and Europe to adopt a passive stance toward Russian
aggression, something the West is inclined toward anyway.

Information warfare, therefore, is cynical rather than
ideological. It seeks to latch onto sentiments and critical rhetoric already
present in democratic societies so as to reduce these countries’ ability to
act. This cynical information strategy involves multiple techniques. First,
Russian officials deny or distort facts in order to create confusion and
superfluous debate. In Ukraine, for example, the Russians deny they are
militarily involved while also insisting that the 2014 Maidan demonstrations in
Kiev were instigated either by neo-fascists or American agents. As ridiculous
as all this sounds to most Americans, such factual distortions generate
suspicion and speculation in other parts of the world more susceptible to
conspiracy theories. Second, the Russians seek to relativize moral differences
between their conduct and the conduct of the United States. When accused of
violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine, for example, Russian
spokespeople quickly refer to the US invasion of Iraq, a war viewed as
illegitimate throughout most of the world. Third, by relativizing moral
differences, the Russians also seek to undermine confidence in democratic
norms. Since the United States appeals to those norms extensively when
justifying its own foreign policy, the ability to point out American hypocrisy
undercuts US criticisms of Russia’s foreign policy.

During the Cold War, Russian information warfare was more
successful in latching onto the rhetoric of the political left. Today, however,
the strategy is bearing fruit on the right. Putin presents himself as a
defender of traditional values and a proponent of national sovereignty, themes
important to the European right. Indeed, the political parties furthest to the
right in Europe frequently cultivate informal relationships with Russia. Many
experts suspect that they also receive Russian financial support (Orenstein
2014). Whether or not this is true is, from the point of view of information
warfare, mostly irrelevant. Putin need not pay off Western politicians to
pursue his information campaign. He needs only to find a few “useful
idiots”—public figures who stir up democratic debate by unwittingly advocating
policies the Russians also favor.

Useful idiots, although always present in Western
democracies, have historically been consigned to the margins. That’s why
Russian information warfare has not scored a lot of historical success. We can
therefore only imagine the tremendous glee in the Kremlin when in the United
States the Republican Party nominated one such useful idiot as its candidate
for president. Like his analogues in Europe, Trump has opaque financial
relations with Russia. After bankrupting four companies, Trump reportedly has
trouble securing capital. He’s forced to rely on private investors, and seems
to have borrowed from Russian oligarchs (Marshall 2016).

None of this means Trump holds his pro-Russian positions
insincerely. Whether or not he does is irrelevant. His dismissive attitude
toward NATO and the European Union closely resembles that of his foreign policy
advisor Carter Page. Page (who, incidentally, has significant investments in
the Russian gas company Gazprom) has been critical of America’s response to the
“so-called” annexation of Crimea. He even goes so far as to draw a parallel
between NATO expansion and the case of Eric Garner, the African American man
who was killed in 2014 by a white New York police officer. In 2015 Page wrote
in Global Policy that the “deaths triggered by US government officials in both
the former Soviet Union and the streets of America in 2014 share a range of
close similarities.” Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign advisor, Paul Manafort, spent
years working for Viktor Yanukovych, the Putin-backed president of Ukraine who
fled office and sought refuge in Russia after the 2014 Maidan demonstrations.
This past August the New York Times even reported that, according to
handwritten ledgers released by a Ukrainian anti-corruption agency, Manafort
had been earmarked to receive $12.7 million in undisclosed cash from
Yanukovych’s political party.

To be sure, Trump’s supporters are probably not interested in
his foreign policy positions. What attracts them, presumably, is his domestic
agenda. In that respect, Trump’s dangerous geopolitical views are a kind of
collateral damage, the unintended consequence of nominating a useful idiot for
president. However, the Republican nominee’s support for such unorthodox and
ignorant views demonstrates that even basic political consensus is breaking
down. The breakdown is no doubt the result of many factors, but surely one
contributing factor is our country’s extreme political polarization. Political
polarization is not only undermining the possibilities of effective governance
in Washington, but also, as Donald Trump shows, it is weakening the country and
threatening our national interests. Assuming we survive the circus of 2016, one
lesson to draw is that political polarization has real costs. In a world more
unstable and uncertain than at any point since the height of the Cold War, all
of us, both politicians and citizens, should recognize the importance, and the
patriotic duty, of reestablishing a core consensus on America’s values and
interests.

H. David Baer is professor of theology and philosophy at Texas Lutheran
University.

Page,
Carter. “No Justice, No Peace: Weapons of Mass Destruction in an Age of
Inequity.” Global Policy, January 5, 2015.
http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/05/01/2015/no-justice-no-nuclear-peace-weapons-mass-destruction-age-inequity